Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @06:26AM
from the large-potatoes dept.

An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Develop:
"The average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen game is $18-$28 million, according to new data. A study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research also puts development costs for single-platform projects at an average of $10 million. The figures themselves may not be too surprising, with high-profile games often breaking the $40 million barrier. Polyphony's Gran Turismo 5 budget is said to be hovering around the $60 million mark, while Modern Warfare 2's budget was said to be as high as $50 million."

I don't see why this is surprising. A game has as much visual design per frame as a Hollywood CGI movie, yet is typically much longer. Add to that the interactivity. The hours of dialogue. The playtesting.

The correlation is between games being multi-platform, and being around double the cost. The post I *meant* to reply to, expressed surprise that multi-platform development should be expensive.

Nitpicking about the exact phrase is not particularly welcome, thanks. We could argue about the subtle nuances of the word "imply". For certain uses you could argue that correlation does "imply" causation in the colloquial use of the term rather than

What a lot of dipshits here like to try to point out is that just because a relationship is visible between two measurements, it does not mean that one is necessarily responsible for the other. Of course, even idiots are aware of this,

A surprising number of people (not even idiots) often fail to realise this. Examples abound.

No, but Call of Duty 5 (World at War) did use Kiefer Sutherland as a voice actor.

MW2 did use professional actors also, although I can't remember who.

Perhaps if games didn't spend money on Hollywood types like this they could cut costs a fair whack- most people wouldn't even know it's Kiefer Sutherland in CoD5, so why not just use someone else who can speak and would be MUCH cheaper.

I wouldn't be suprised if between all the actors paid in MW2 to do voices there was a few million spent.

Perhaps if games didn't spend money on Hollywood types like this they could cut costs a fair whack- most people wouldn't even know it's Kiefer Sutherland in CoD5, so why not just use someone else who can speak and would be MUCH cheaper.

Perhaps because there can be a thin line between "not spending on those hollywood types for voice-acting" and "hire uncle joe to do it".

We had a few generations of cd-rom games to prove the latter doesn't work that well, even when the games embraced the B-movie-feel of cheap

Professional voice acting is one of the things that have improved on gaming regardless hardware upgrades - and it does make a difference (if the game needs voice at all, of course).

Absolutely. I've just finished Bayonetta -- hardly a budget effort. They've clearly used professional voice actors, but even so it would have improved matters greatly if the acting had a bit more spark. Long speeches performed slowly and only just well enough -- well, it's a blot on an otherwise superb product.

I don't disagree bad voice acting can ruin a game, I had the misfortune of buying Rogue Warrior recently to see that first hand.

I'm just suprised you'd need to pay for acting talent when all you want is voice- I'd have thought you could get voice actors cheaper than you could get physical and voice actors. Similarly, although I agree you wouldn't want to just use any old joe for it, I'd have thought there are plenty of low end voice actors that are perfectly good enough for a game well below hollywood rates

I'm just suprised you'd need to pay for acting talent when all you want is voice- I'd have thought you could get voice actors cheaper than you could get physical and voice actors. Similarly, although I agree you wouldn't want to just use any old joe for it, I'd have thought there are plenty of low end voice actors that are perfectly good enough for a game well below hollywood rates.

But all you want isn't just a voice, what you want is someone who can take someone else's movements and do a voice so well that

But all you want isn't just a voice, what you want is someone who can take someone else's movements and do a voice so well that even without a human body, you can still pick up on things like, emotions, fears, desires, interest, etc.

Just a nitpick: typically the voices are recorded first, and the animator matches the actions to the voice.

In movies, they're increasingly doing mo-cap and voice recording at the same time (e.g. Andy Serkis acting Gollum or Kong). Game cut scenes would be improved by using decent actors and adopting this technique.

In movies, they're increasingly doing mo-cap and voice recording at the same time (e.g. Andy Serkis acting Gollum or Kong). Game cut scenes would be improved by using decent actors and adopting this technique.

Yes, but sometimes that doesn't turn out very well. I've heard many reports of the Japanese version of Final Fantasy X being pretty aweful, because they used the same people who did motion capture to do the voices. Sometimes it really requires the time and patience of a straightforward recording studio

Half of why movies are so expensive is actors and scriptwriters unions and the hollywood monopoly,
so far games have much more indepence. But i am suprised at the the cost of these Major
games, i'm old enough to rembember when one teenager could write a game on his home
computer with a budget of zero. But yes a modern computer game needs a room full
of visual design artists and a enough room full of programmers, and lets not forget game play
design and testing.

Half of why movies are so expensive is actors and scriptwriters unions and the hollywood monopoly

Feh. Seriously? Was that necessary to bring in to this conversation? You REALLY think unions are the reason why actors get paid so much?

By the way, there are a TON of movies made on a shoestring budget that rival anything out of Hollywood. I Like Killing Flies is a move that is a perfect example of that. Directed, Produced, Edited, AND Filmed all by one guy.

District 9 is another great example, although on a much larger scale. Do you know how much District 9's budget was? Go ahead, take a guess. $30 [latimes.com]

1 the products of the graphic arts, esp. commercial design or illustration.2 the use of diagrams in calculation and design.3 (also computer graphics) [treated as pl. ] visual images produced by computer processing.

Visuals...a picture, piece of film, or display used to illustrate or accompany something.

...many film schools have SAG Student Film Agreements with the Guild to allow SAG actors to work in their projects. SAGIndie was formed in 1997 to promote independent filmmaking using SAG actors; SAG also has Low Budget Contracts that are meant to encourage the use of SAG members on films produced outside of the major studios and to prevent film productions from leaving the country

I wasn't quote mining you just don't understand what your reading, Physburn said that the unions drive up costs. You said Bull. I said Union rules say they have to do union work.

Try reading your quote again. It say they charge $x amount for the major studios because they can afford it. For small studios they charge a lot less because they can't afford it and if that small studio decides to leave the country the SAG gets nothing.

I want someone to prove that unions are responsible for "half of why movies are so expensive".

What he was saying is unsupportable by any data and the quote you mined doesn't support it either.

I've made a new year's resolution that whenever I see uninformed anti-labor FUD here on Slashdot, I'm going to challenge it. It's baloney when the GOP leadership in congress does it, it's baloney when right-wing corporatist medi

Not really. You don't have actors demanding to be kept in 5 star opulence for the duration of the shoot. You don't need to move film crews and casts from location to location. You don't actually go around blowing up tanks, or crashing $100k sportscars. Granted, I see no same reason why you would want to do any of those if you could get the same result by using CGI (which to be bluntly honest isn't always up to the task - especially when it comes to explosions) but until all CGI is photorealistic there will

World of Goo is a great game, but I don't think it follows that the money spent on big budget games is wasted.

To make the comparison with movies: lots of people like the low budget Clerks. But millions more like the expensive Lord of the Rings. Part of what they like is all that expensive looking grandeur. You couldn't make Lord of the Rings on Clerks' budget.

You couldn't make GTA IV on World of Goo's budget. I think there's room in this world for both games.

I didn't read the article, but, how can making a game multiplatform almost double the cost? I thought the art, levels, motion capturing, all the data, etc... was the most expensive. Writing the code probably also is expensive, but if you develop for multiplatform a lot of code (AI etc...) can be shared and only things like renderer and input need multiple implementations, which can't be THAT much more work??

I think it might be something to do with multiplatform usually meaning PS3, 360, PC, while Single platform includes the Wii, portables, and download service games so small that they are unique to one service, the latter having much lower costs.

if you develop for multiplatform a lot of code (AI etc...) can be shared and only things like renderer and input need multiple implementations, which can't be THAT much more work??

I know of no single language that compiles to every single bytecode. For example, say you want to publish a game on several platforms. One only runs ActionScript bytecode. Another only runs JVM bytecode. Another exclusively uses CLR bytecode (unless you're a large enough business to qualify for PowerPC instructions). Another uses ARM instructions. Another uses x86 instructions. So in what language should the developer write the physics and AI to target all platforms?

I'm pretty sure TOA is talking about PC+Xbox360+PS3 and maybe Wii. Nobody's blowing $20M on making a Flash game.

Having said that, PopCap and their ilk make games in the space you're talking about. I'm certain Peggle didn't have a $20M budget.

A decent strategy for that kind of game would be to write for a VM, and implement that VM on all the target platforms. That was the approach taken by Infocom for their text adventures, and by LucasArts for their point+click adventures.

Unless it's a handheld device that runs Flash and the game is a port of the $20 million Xbox 360/PC game to the handheld device.

I don't know of any such titles. Do you have one in mind? Handheld "versions" of games (e.g. gameboy versions) tend not to actually be the same game.

Then you lose iPhone and iPod Touch due to Apple's developer program restrictions.

Is that strictly true? As long as you distribute the VM and the code to run within it as a single bundle, and don't provide a way to load arbitrary code into the VM, I'd guess that would be OK with Apple. The iPhone C64 emulator was approved by Apple when they removed the ability to type in BASIC commands. (Then it was pulled again when it turned out the featur

Handheld "versions" of games (e.g. gameboy versions) tend not to actually be the same game.

A lot of handheld games are completely different games in the same series (compare Metal Gear Solid on PS1 to the PS1-era GBC games for instance), but plenty are more-or-less direct ports (compare Dr. Mario 64 to Dr. Mario + Puzzle League for GBA).

As long as you distribute the VM and the code to run within it as a single bundle, and don't provide a way to load arbitrary code into the VM, I'd guess that would be OK with Apple.

True, I could write the physics and AI in Lua as long as I take appropriate measures to lock down the script loader. But interpreters still have overhead. In commercial games that make heavy use of a scripting engine, how much time does the CPU spend in the interp

Then you lose iPhone and iPod Touch due to Apple's developer program restrictions.

Who cares - that's their fault. Won't run on an Amiga too. Perfectly good cross-platform strategies shouldn't be ignored just because they don't include a minority of the market. It worries me that Apple's policies will end up dictating how games are written, even when they have little share in these markets...

It's Apple's fault, but it's developers' problem. This is true especially as the market share of smartphones grows at the expense of dumbphones, phoneless PDAs, and dedicated gaming devices.

It worries me that Apple's policies will end up dictating how games are written

The policies of Nintendo and Sony have long dictated how games are written: if a game is to allow multiple players to use one TV-sized monitor and multiple controllers, it needs to be for one or more consoles, not the PC (EA Sports being the exception), and therefore it needs to follow all the console rules including minimum size of business. Only recently have the majority of new TVs become able to handle the EDTV and HDTV signals that PCs produce on their VGA, DVI-D, and HDMI connectors.

Testing, development kits, more staff to work on each port...not to mention the porting itself. It isn't as simple as just clicking a button, it's actually a fairly intense process. It's safe to say that hiring people who know what they are doing when it comes to the porting process doesn't come cheap, either.

Cause and effect are getting confused here. It's not that going from single-platform to multi-platform takes your budget from 10M to 20M, it's that having a 20M budget means you have to be multi-platform, while a smaller, 10M game can make its money back on a single platform.

Multiplatform dev does increase cost by a bit, but not a staggering amount. The main costs are usually in engineering (and QA, but the cost of QA guys is miniscule next to the cost of programmers). Several people have pointed out that h

I didn't read the article, but, how can making a game multiplatform almost double the cost? I thought the art, levels, motion capturing, all the data, etc... was the most expensive.

I didn't RTFA either, but in recent memory a number of games have had graphical differences across platforms that required artist intervention. I don't know about it being 'double' the cost to do that, but man-hours can really add up when you have to scour all the assets for all the game locales to deal with a different limit. Given the differences between the architectures of the XBOX and PS3, it makes some sense.

Exactly. Getting something to run on an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii is very hard because they are very different platforms. So while there are frameworks and tools that help get the code running on all platforms, so the differences between the hardware is less of a hassle than it used to be, it's a lot of work making the game run *well* on all platforms. For example, you can't use the same 3d models or textures on a Wii and a PS3 or Xbox 360, so you need to redo them (unless you want the PS3 and Xbox 360 to look like a Wii). And, of course, each company has its own approval process, with its own UI standards, etc., as well as unique hardware to be taken into account (e.g. Wiimote). What this means is that while you can reuse the core logic, level design, etc., there's still tons of work to do for each additional platform.

Ok, I get it now, I guess with multiplatform games I was thinking too much about games for Windows, Mac and Linux. But of course I had forgotten that PC gaming is dead and games refers to consoles today.

Getting something to run on an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii is very hard because they are very different platforms. So while there are frameworks and tools that help get the code running on all platforms, so the differences between the hardware is less of a hassle than it used to be, it's a lot of work making the game run *well* on all platforms.

However, the engine is a small fraction of the cost of a game, especially when an existing cross-platform engine is used (although even these often get tweaked).

Model design, level design, scripting, voice acting, motion capture; all these are very significant costs, and are portable. Level scripting is usually done in a higher level language than C, and is portable across platforms.

And, of course, each company has its own approval process, with its own UI standards, etc., as well as unique hardware to be taken into account (e.g. Wiimote). What this means is that while you can reuse the core logic, level design, etc., there's still tons of work to do for each additional platform.

True enough. Xbox Achievements and so forth.

I'd still argue, though, that the reason cross-platform games tend to correlate with expensive-to-make games, is that having spend megabucks on designing a game, publishers want as many potential buyers as possible.

(The key exceptions, of course, being Sony or MS exclusives, which those companies use to increase the prestige of their platforms)

Oh yeah, I'd love to see that logic applied to something like graphics, sound or (to a lesser degree, I admit) networking.

C is platform independent... old meme with little truth behind it. Yes, in theory pure ANSI C should be portable. Well, ok, there are platform specific extensions in certain areas, (see graphics, sound...), but the core mechanic is, right? Wrong. Considering how game programming has been abusing architecture flaws and features (as an example, take the IEEE754 quirk used to do quick squar

C was designed with platform Independence in mind. 90% of the C code is portable across platforms.

But the remaining ten percent of low level fiddly stuff is the killer. And games do a lot of it.
Bypassing the best practices to get an extra few FPS out of the hardware can't be done with straight portable code. So the devs use everytrick and every undocumented or poorly documented hack they can. This is why games crash more than other apps. And why games are more likely to cause a problem in the PC world, when you change OS version.

The 360 and PS3 are quite similar from a performance, memory and graphical standpoint, so making code that runs for both platforms (and the PC) is probably a hell of a lot easier than for the Wii. The PS3 is probably the odd fish since it uses SPU tasks but it can still share virtually all of the graphical / audio assets and probably 80-90% of the code. Much of the code in places like EA / Ubisoft etc. is probably middleware anyway so a

You're assuming that performance characteristics are the the most difficult thing to get around. That's not really the case though. Even though the performance of the Wii is quite a bit different, it's basic architecture is quite traditional and simple to code for, as is the 360. Whereas the PS3 is an insanely different beast. I've heard that porting code between PC, 360 and Wii is a lot simpler than the PS3. The PS3s cell multithreading is supposedly a dog.

Games keep getting more and more complicated and more expensive but no more fun. I just completed Assassin's Creed over the weekend. I found the gameplay mechanic for Theif, which preceded it by over ten years, to me much more fun.

There is to some degree that kind of thing going on, one could argue that Super Mario Bros 3 is better than the new Super Mario Bros Wii, while the latter one is merely a re-iteration of the former, it has quite a few of its own quirks. I could understand how the older see it as derivative and the younger would not understand how they think #3 is better.

But that is specifically from the console perspective. PC Games - specifically ones from the Era that he is refering to, had

The fun thing to remember though is that when people discover old music, they usually discover the songs that aged well. Most of the songs back then were crap too.

At the same time, when we open the radio, we listen to the good songs once in a while AND the crap most of the time. This is where the idea that old songs were much better is so popular. This is also true for movies.

Not a particularly fair comparison. Thief was acknowledged at the time as a classic; there are usually one or two games per year that achieve this status. The original Assassin's Creed had distinctly mixed reviews, with criticism particularly levelled at poor and unintuitive controls and mechanics (apparently the sequel is better, but I haven't played it).

I've played plenty of recent games from the same genre that I'd rate more highly than Thief in objective terms; Batman: Arkham Asylum being probably the b

Nope. I seem to think that "fair" means "comparing like with like" (in this instance). Comparing an acknowledged classic from one era to a game recognised as mediocre from another and basing your entire argument around this does not qualify as this.

I don't really think there's a bright future for you anywhere, outside of forum trolling.

Modern game development focuses more on expensive, movie-like graphics than on clever, original, innovative gameplay. In fact, with budgets like this, innovation is dangerous. Better stick to what's been proven to sell. Just like in Hollywood. Innovation usually starts small, and the bigger the business becomes, the smaller innovation has to start.

Which is why original gameplay tends to come from small games without masses of fancy (read: expensive) CGI.

Or, to put it another way: How is this year's football/American football/driving/basketball game any different from last years apart from slightly updated graphics, minor tweaks to the engine and they renamed the players/teams/cars to account for changes in the last year?

Which is why original gameplay tends to come from small games without masses of fancy (read: expensive) CGI.

I'm not sure if it explains anything. If a small group of people can make a small game in a relatively small amount of time, with a small marketing/distribution budget, then why can't a big company do the same thing with a tiny fraction of their budget/workforce/time?

Sort of. Granted, an update of the SuperFootbal franchise is incredibly cheap, and makes for a relatively quick buck, but of course, the market for these games are not nearly strong enough to sustain a comapany; sooner or later they're going to have to branch out.

And the sports games are by far the easiest franchises to update; everything else usually requires some radically new element, be it a new setting (with new cutscenes, new voice acting, new levels/environments, etc) or new gameplay. Essentially, a

That fact makes me increasingly interested in just treating the history of games as something to mine for stuff to play. I used to have basically a 1- or 2-year game horizon: what I'm going to play this weekend was determined by choosing from the list of recent games. But now I have more like a 20-year horizon; I might play a recent game this weekend, or I might play a classic game I've heard a lot about that I haven't gotten around to experiencing myself, yet. It seems that as games get taken more seriously as a medium, instead of just throw-away entertainment, it ought to move in that direction. I mean, it's not like avid readers read only new-release best-sellers. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you read Victor Hugo or Isaac Asimov.

Even for new games, there are fortunately still a lot of less-expensive games that come out that can be innovative, and some even manage to get some decent press; World of Goo and Braid are two of the more prominent recent success stories. This year's Indie Game Festival [igf.com] has a lot of interesting stuff, too. Indie games might be even more vibrant than indie film is, these days.

Welcome to getting older. I can't believe how easy I was to entertain when I was a teen, plus then I didn't really know the meaning of "work". It was all either fun or learning, even the grinding was just a little interlude. And every generation talks about something, like how say vinyl had more soul than CDs, or the people in costumes had more soul than CGI, and how real world makebelieve had more soul than virtual makebelieve and so on.

Each one of these megagames probably used far more skill and time on a professional writer than the computer geek who part-time doubled as gfx artist, sfx artist, composer and sometimes writer on your garage setup obscure game. I can at least say that with most old games I can have kind memories but if I start playing then many of them I get fed up because it's so simple and boring to a mind that's had another ten years of experience at figuring stuff out.

"Better" is to blunt a qualifier to use. In a lot of aspects old games where quite awful. When it comes to issues like user-interfaces for example many old games are near unplayable by todays standards. And the amount or lack of frames-per-second wasn't pretty either.

However there are also many areas where older games are just superior to most stuff out today. Humor for example is nearly extinct from todays games, yet games like the LucasArts adventures had ton of that and are still played to this day. Anot

If you took at any recent AAA title game, marketing and distribution costs are huge. Apparently the marketing budget for COD:MW2 was $200 million (although that probably includes distribution costs) with development $40-50 million. According to http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2009/11/19/modern-warfare-2s-development-budget-40-50-million/ [thatvideogameblog.com]
Halo 3's was $40 million+ of marketing, similar to dev cost. GTAIV would of had similar if not more, being a multi platform title. Although wiki says the development of GTAIV was estimated to cost near $100.
A friend of mine from THQ complained that De Blob sold really well, then they blew the equivalent of profits on the marketing campaign for japan, and the game flopped there.

Sounds like more fodder for game developers and publishers to whine about lost revenues due to used game sales and piracy, as well as justifying their pricing models and DLC systems. Kind of pointless having a huge game development budget when it's the same, uninnovative, linear experience time and time again. Thankfully, the increasing success of so-called "indie" games may have them rethink their huge dev costs.

and yet Forza is now the superior series yet so many GT fans sit with their eyes closed refusing to see it.(disclaimer: PS3 fanboy here, dislike the 360 and dislike the way Microsoft handle live, nickel and dime customers and STILL got a 360 just for Forza 3 - worth every penny)

GT is finished, they have diluted the game so much with nascar, indycar, WRC, F1, regular cars - they don't know WHAT they are doing.The driving physics are getting worse, not better and in the most recent release (GT Academy) the F

Its too bad that Forza can only be experienced with the shitty MS steering wheel. I know there are some 3rd party wheels for 360 but they are stuff like MadCatz, not logitech. A shame really. Ill take GT5 and a good logitech wheel over Forza and the MS wheel anyday.

No, the people who think it is a good idea to spend $3000 on gaming computers and are willing to pay $700 just for a game console buy games for the looks. Meaning rich teenagers whose mommy and daddy throw money at them.

The masses don't really care about 10 billion polygon "realistically" shaded 3d scenes rendered by massive chips. But then the masses wouldn't pay $60 just for a video game, and the video game "industry" calls anything but FPS and RTS titles "casual games."

Is that for game development only, or are we including those highly expensive spots during super bowl to show call of duty 23I like computer games as much as the next guy, but a lot of budgets are also grossly exaggerated so that the next year you keep that same budget, as in the military, wasting money so you don't lose your budget the next year....if a new company comes out and puts out a game as good as some of these with big budgets, and obviously with 1/10 the budget being new and all, does that not me

I've often wondered how large the licensing fees are. Every big-budget movie needs a big-budget game with a synchronized release date. But the game developer is taking a big risk that the movie doesn't bomb and no one will buy the game (no matter how good it is). Even if the movie is a success, the game is really part of the movie's marketing, so maybe the movie studio's licensing fees are fairly small to encourage game developers to take the risk of creating the game? Even things like automobiles in ra

Think about it. 10-20 hours of gameplay content, a few square miles' worth of environmental models and effects, dozens of characters and animations, matching voiceover and audio content, and the engine, AI and gameplay code to drive it all. Add to that between 20 minutes and an hour's worth of CG movies.
Now consider that we're doing this with teams 1/5th the size of what they are for 2-hour movies, at 1/8th of the budget in half the time (exceptions notwithstanding).
$50M for the most expensive games doesn